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Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Latest Parade Magazine begs question: has eating replaced buying stuff as the way to celebrate in America

By Marc Jampole

Most of us have heard of twice baked potatoes and those who
frequent Chinese restaurants often see twice cooked pork on the menu.And home brewers sometime pride themselves on
their twice fermented beer.

But today’s Parade
Magazine one-ups all double-cooking by presenting a menu of delights that
has been homogenized not once, not twice, but three times. Let’s call it thrice-homogenized cuisine.

The basic starting ingredient in Parade’s recipe is Memorial
Day.

In the past, Parade has
often had special articles, sections and whole issues dedicated to Memorial
Day. Today there was not a trace of the holiday, originally meant to honor the members
of the United States armed forces who fell while fighting in the Civil War and long
ago expanded to include American soldiers who died in any war (which thankfully
leaves out the immoral traitors of the Confederacy who fought for slavery and
against their own country).

What Parade did
feature for its Memorial Day issue, on both its cover and the main story covering
3.33 of the 12 pages that did not have full-page ads, was an article about 12
foods they called “All-American classics.”

The largest of the several cover headlines gives a hint to
how Parade’s editors cooked up the
notion of an issue essentially dedicated to American food classics.The headline reads: CELEBRATE SUMMER FOODS!

The jump from Memorial Day to American food classics
“Celebrate Summer Foods” is a simple matter of homogenizing three times. Each
homogenization involves the reduction of a complex experience to a single
attribute shared with other experiences:

Memorial Day is homogenized until it becomes not
a holiday to honor fallen soldiers, but the beginning of summer.

Summer activities homogenize into eating summer
foods.

Summer foods homogenize into American food
classics.

Thus, Memorial Day serves as the unspoken rationale for an
article that tells us the origin of and one great place to buy 12 food products
that all originate in the United States.

Parade arranges its
menu of American classics into four categories, as follows:

As usual, Parade
scraps any pretense of healthy eating from the start. The only real vegetables
are the crudities you bathe with dip and use to line the iceberg lettuce. The
only real fruit is the dried stuff you mix into the high-calorie granola.Parade
could have provided balance and supported the movement for better nutrition by
substituting many healthier American dishes such as fruit or sweet potato pie,
green bean casserole, collard greens, baked beans, clam chowder and pot roast
with root vegetables. I have saved for
its own sentence the quintessentially healthy American dish, one that other
than hamburgers and hotdogs symbolizes Memorial Day/summer picnics: corn on the cob!

Parade is probably
the most widely-read publication in the United States by virtue of being a
freebee found among the coupon offers and advertising circulars of most Sunday
newspapers.The Parade website has no reference to Memorial Day except for an article by Martha Stewart on her
favorite Memorial Day recipes and another giving 20 recipes for a Memorial Day
cookout. Looks to me that as far as Parade
is concerned, all its readers want for Memorial Day is a good home-cooked meal.

Since beginning OpEdge almost three years ago, I have
written often about the commoditization of all emotions and human interactions
in contemporary America. To express anything, we buy.

I’m wondering now if food consumption—eating something—has
replaced the economic consumption represented by buying something as the
central way to express oneself, at least in groups.Today’s Parade
made me realize that we now reduce Memorial Day to a barbecue; that’s pretty
much what July 4 is, too. My Mother’s Day blog built a case that the primary means to celebrate Mother’s Day is to
bring her breakfast in bed (with a nice restaurant meal a close second). We’ve always had Thanksgiving and the
candy elements of Valentine’s Day and Halloween.A few years back, the news media reported on
the trend of every childhood activity, even a simple practice, to be
accompanied by a snack. Do we see
reality reflected in situation comedies, in which a lot more of the action
takes place over food nowadays? Compare “Big Bang Theory” and “2.5 Men” to “All
in the Family” and “The Jeffersons” (or even to “Seinfeld” and its dependence
on a local restaurant booth as a regular set.)In the contemporary sit coms I cited, the actors spend much more time
chowing down than in older sit coms.

At the end of the day Parade’s
triple homogenization is based on the double consumption of raising food to the
primary expression of celebration: you have to buy it to eat it, which means
you are consuming twice, once as an economic entity and once as a celebrator.

If it weren’t for the entertainment value, I’d be pleased that Texas Governor Rick Perry is foundering in the Republican presidential race. After all, Governor Perry, who is in an unprecedented fourth term as chief executive of the nation's second-largest state, still might get the Republican nomination for president. If that happens there’s no telling what the voters might be fooled into doing. Just look at how far George W. Bush got.